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Yahoo’s beleaguered CEO Scott Thompson is out, in a shakeup that replaced the company’s chairman of the board and added new directors chosen by a dissident shareholder.

Unable to ride out the storm over a false academic degree listed on his resume, Thompson left the company over the weekend. Yahoo issued a statement Sunday mentioning Thompson’s name briefly, and only in connection with announcing his replacement, Ross Levinsohn, as interim CEO. Levinsohn was Yahoo’s executive vice president and head of global media.

The decision to replace Thompson over his false claim of holding a degree in computer science jelled late Friday, after search firm Heidrick & Struggles denied it had anything to do with the falsification. In meetings he held to attempt to calm the waters last week, Thompson blamed a staffer at an unnamed headhunting firm for making the resume mistake, which he failed to notice for eight years.

That firm would have been Heidrick & Struggles, which was handling his placement at eBay. keep reading…

If you have ever been in a situation when checking references on a candidate you uncovered negative references and/or performance reviews, you are not alone. What you do with the information is key.

This is one of the most misunderstood, hence mishandled, situations preventing good candidates from being hired. I have seen people get poor reviews because of “sour grapes,” and it happens more often than you may think. I’ve had managers tell me negative things about a former employee, and upon diving in and asking more detailed questions, determined the negative feedback to be sour grapes or a poor fit with culture or the manager. Oftentimes a hiring manager calls a former associate of his whom the candidate worked for and gets a lousy reference. In a split second the candidate is dropped from consideration without further investigation.

The opposite holds true of positive references: if the same manager gets a glowing reference on the candidate, he makes an offer. But neither of these situations individually indicates whether or not the candidate is “right” for you.

Benefit of the Doubt keep reading…

Last Week Dan Loeb of Third Point Capital sent a letter to the board of directors of Yahoo asserting that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson actually did not have a degree in degree in computer science as his executive biography indicated. Yahoo replied that this was an “inadvertent error.” Mr. Loeb wrote a response to the board demanding his removal for cause by noon on Monday.

Stories are being written by Kara Swisher, Michael Arrington, and many others about the incident. Most articles discuss the integrity of Thompson or the board of directors itself. Some might ask the legitimate question of whether an executive of a technology company even needs a computer science degree. Answer: They don’t. After all, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner did an amazing job turning around in the 1990s after initially turning down the job because he didn’t consider himself a technology guy. It makes the actions of Thompson all the more puzzling.

Ultimately this begs the following question, “How in the world did a Fortune 500 company recruit and hire a CEO with inaccurate statements in his biography?” This might indicate symptoms of a more broad and disturbing problem, such as lack of proper recruiting budget investment, formal process, and execution of proper human capital processes. To view this as a Yahoo problem and move on would be missing a rare opportunity to drive positive change. keep reading…

On April 25, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued an updated Enforcement Guidance on employer use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended. The Guidance summarizes the EEOC’s long-held position that employers’ reliance on arrest and conviction records may have a disparate impact on individuals because of their race or national origin. Although not legally binding, the Guidance provides key insight into how the EEOC views the use of criminal records when screening applicants. keep reading…

What Facebook Reveals About Candidates

In recent weeks there have been a lot of stories about employers asking candidates for their Facebook passwords or accepting a hiring manager as a friend, apparently sanctioned by HR. This is the kind of behavior that so endears HR to others in the organziation, and why it’s true that no child grows up wanting to work in HR. I suspect this has more to do with some people trying to justify their existence and demonstrate that they belong in the 21st century than with accomplishing anything useful. The problem may solve itself since such acts are a violation of FB’s privacy policy – but never underestimate the tenacity of an HR professional determined to prove their usefulness.

But the more relevant question here is: what do they expect to find? keep reading…

I read an article last week about job candidates being asked for their Facebook passwords so that potential employers can examine their personal activity. It also covers law enforcement agencies making similar demands of their applicants. So at the risk of getting tarred and feathered, here I go.

When did companies decide that it’s okay to invade someone’s privacy? Some candidates said that they feel like they have to say yes to this “request” since they need the work. One individual in the article referred to it as “coercion.”

Any company attempting to take advantage of candidates in this way should be ashamed. This wouldn’t have been considered even five years ago. Just because it has gotten easy to check someone’s social activity doesn’t make it appropriate to ask them for their password or that they “friend” you so you can spy on them. I can almost hear the requester respond, upon asking how s/he would feel if they would feel if asked this, “I don’t have anything to hide.” But that’s not the point.  keep reading…

Calling all tech industry recruiters. Get ready to pounce. Yahoo, as we presume you’ve heard, is about to dump thousands of its employees.

Exactly who is going isn’t known publicly, though reports (all stemming from the original article on All Things D) say CEO Scott Thompson has targeted “public relations and marketing, research, marginal businesses and weaker regional efforts.” Will engineers be among those laid off? Very likely, since they’ve been a part of each of the preceding five layoffs.

Get busy reaching out now, before everyone else does. And you do know how to find these people, right?  You could start here.

Happy City; Sad City

Never let it be said that we can’t be suckered by a little PR stunt. This one, though, got our attention with lists of the happiest and unhappiest U.S. cities in which to work. keep reading…

Cyber-vetting may sound like solely a way to dig up dirt about someone. But it can be used to not only avoid a bad hire, but also help perform a good hire and increase the chance of a good fit.

About 80% of employers search and track the online activities of candidates in a practice often referred to as cyber-vetting. How and why is this done? How should you do it? Where is it going?

Here are a couple of ways employers are using cyber-vetting to assess candidates: keep reading…

Ever since Facebook started rolling out its facial  recognition service — officially “Tag Suggestions” — a few months ago, pictures have been getting tagged with the names of the people who are in them, without their permission and even without their knowledge.

As you might imagine, this is causing an outcry about the privacy implications. Last week, just days after Facebook extended its facial recognition to Europe and other countries, a group of privacy organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. One of the issues is that Facebook requires users to opt-out rather than opt-in to the service. The bigger part, however, is over what data Facebook is collecting and how it will be used.

European Union regulators raised the alarm last week, and now some in Congress are complaining about Facebook’s implementation.

Facebook’s response? “We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.” To be fair to Facebook, the service has been around for months in the U.S. without much complaint. But a Sophos blog post complained that it was turned on for users elsewhere without any notification, and that the default is on. keep reading…

Even as states and the U.S. EEOC are getting tougher — and talking tougher — on the use of credit checks, more employers are using them, says a just-released survey of trends in background screening.

Of the 783 responses to the survey conducted in March by EmployeeScreenIQ, 21 percent of the respondents reported they credit check all their employees. Last year EmployeeScreenIQ found only 15 percent reported doing that.

Whether they check all or just some employees, more companies are checking. The survey found two-thirds of perform credit checks; that’s up from 61 percent last year.

SHRM got similar numbers when it surveyed members in winter 2009. Forty percent said they credit-checked no one; 13 percent reported credit checking everyone.

It seems surprising that the number of companies performing universal credit checks is going up, even as the debate over whether they should even be allowed is intensifying. keep reading…

Mostly what HR professionals are looking up online is pretty standard information about candidates, like LinkedIn recommendations. Fewer — but still quite a few — are trying to find out more controversial stuff, such as photos or what groups on Facebook a job candidate belongs to.

That’s the upshot of a SHLPreVisor study of more than 460 human resources professionals. The majority (53%) were in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with 39% in the Americas and 8% in Australasia. Here’s a chart showing what’s being searched: keep reading…

Government background checks of federal contract employees are constitutional, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

“Reasonable investigations of applicants and employees aid the government in ensuring the security of its facilities and in employing a competent, reliable workforce,” said the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. That the workers who sued the government on privacy grounds were contractors and not civil servants was a formality and all but irrelevant, Alito wrote.

The case was brought by 28 scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena  The sprawling facility is operated by the California Institute of Technology. The plaintiffs are employees of Caltech. keep reading…

In case you were enjoying yourself over the holidays instead of reading my critically-acclaimed (OK, criticized) articles, my objective is to bring best practices to the HR forefront. Experience shows organizations that make informed hiring and promotion decisions (e.g., based on objective job-related tools) tend to have happier employees, are more successful, and reduce their potential for unfair hiring practice challenges.

That said, in case you might have missed Hiring the Kind of Salespeople You Only Dream About, I found John Zappe’s EEOC article a great companion. That is, if your organization routinely uses credit checking when hiring salespeople, you might want to know how the present Washington administration treats employers who don’t do their hiring homework. keep reading…

Just when it appeared the year would end without more consolidation in the talent acquisition arena, two deals managed to get in under the wire.

On the penultimate day of 2010, First Advantage was acquired by a private equity firm that also holds a sizeable chunk of Lawson Software. Symphony Technology Group, based in Palo Alto, California, bought First Advantage for $265 million in cash from owner CoreLogic.

First Advantage is involved in multiple aspects of talent acquisition, including background screening and assessments, applicant tracking technology, onboarding, and candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing. keep reading…

With the U.S. beginning its fourth year of a sour economy that is taking its toll on consumer credit scores, the EEOC signaled this week that it is taking a hard look at employers who use credit checks as a screening tool.

Kaplan Higher Education Corp. was sued Tuesday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its use of credit checks. The suit claims Kaplan denied jobs based on credit histories in such a way that it had a disparate impact on blacks.

The EEOC said Kaplan “engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide.”

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity.” The types of jobs at issue weren’t disclosed.

A company spokeswoman denied the charge, saying background checks are conducted on all potential employees. Credit checks are part of the screening for jobs involving financial matters, including advising students on financial aid. keep reading…

Employment reference checking and background screening should win recognition as the weakest of all corporate HR processes. A validity meta-analysis study conducted by Aamodt & Williams in 2005 found that the corrected validity coefficient for reference recommendations and actual job performance was a staggeringly low .29. Despite the facts, 96% of organizations use reference checks as a screening and selection tool, according to a recent survey by SHRM.

Anyone who’s been in the profession for more than a minute or two knows deep down that references suck as indicators. keep reading…

Employee referrals and social media have begun to blend together. Could background checks and social media be next?

A new company called “Social Intelligence” says it’ll “track the worldwide network of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, individual blogs, and thousands of other sources.”

Social Intelligence will, within 24-48 hours, produce a report on a job candidate using both automation as well as humans, the latter there to make sure there aren’t “false positives.” It says it will weed out “protected class” information it finds, such as race and religion. The company is also offering a version to monitor what existing employees are up to.

As far as the hiring version, a screenshot, which you can click on to enlarge, shows that the employee profile screens for such things as: ”Gangs,” “Drugs/drug lingo,” “demonstrating potentially violent behavior,” and “poor judgment” — something we could all agree can be found in ample supply on social media.

I asked the company’s CEO, Max Drucker, whether this judgment thing is kind of subjective. “We err on the side of not flagging something,” he says, adding that “serious red-flag issues” are what they’re really looking for. He also notes that the firm has three people review information before the profile’s done. So, “Todd beat Sean in the 600-meter dash” shouldn’t show up as a Todd-beats-people flag. I hope. keep reading…

In the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I take a four-part look at credit checks in the employment process. I outline the current federal limitations on an employers’ ability to obtain and use information regarding an applicant’s or employee’s credit history. I delineate the current proposed amendments to federal statutes. I look at recently enacted state legislation bearing on an employer’s use of credit reports. Finally, I suggest possible options for employers in dealing with this fast-changing legal landscape.

For these purposes online, I’m just going to tackle the fourth part — your options for handling federal and state legislation in flux. keep reading…

You have a great candidate who seems ideal for the job you’re looking to fill and you start researching her online. You land on her Facebook page where you see a picture of her and your spouse or partner, which suggests that they’re more than friends. What do you do?

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority. keep reading…